This Week in Internet Marketing 2012 02 27

We’re nearing the end of February, but there’s no sign of slow down in the internet marketing industry. Last week we saw: 10 SEO faux pas for bloggers; a great way to tell how many of your site visitors use social media; 90% of the web lagging behind the mobile curve; smartphones influencing the way we shop; and rumoured new ad formats coming to Facebook.

This Week in Internet Marketing 2012 02 27

There’s no better way to consistently add new content to your site than to blog and let’s face it many us of blog to improve our SEO. This article highlights some common blogging mistakes and how to avoid them. Common pitfalls include buying links, using duplicate content, and keyword stuffing. This is a great resource for both the seasoned and rookie blogger.

When deciding whether or not to embark on a social media campaign it’s tough to know whether or not it will be relevant to your customers. Many businesses with older clientele are hesitant to delve into social media. Now there’s a way to know how many of your site visitors use Facebook! This article from SEOmoz teaches us how to gather this data using JavaScript and Google Analytics.

It turns out that only 10% of websites have a mobile version. With the growth of smartphones and tablets comes greater urgency for you to build a mobile site. Why? Because the user experience is extremely low when viewing standard sites on mobile –forms don’t work properly and Flash further compounds the problem. This all leads to a high bounce rate. This also applies to any PPC landing pages that you might be running.

Smartphones have become a huge part of the way many of us shop. Neilson recently published some interesting findings which found “thirty-eight percent of smartphone owners check prices online while they’re in a store, and 38% also shop from their phones.” The second most popular activity was reading online reviews at 32%, while 24% of people looked online for coupons.

Recently leaked documents hint at some new possibilities for Facebook ads. The biggest change is this: currently one of your regular status updates reaches on average 16% of your fans; a new post-ad will reach 3-5x more people than a regular post. This effectively bypasses Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm that determines what users see in their news feed. There are plenty more tidbits of Facebook’s new advertising direction in the leaked document. It’s an exciting times to be a Facebook marketer!